Amazon Music Is The First Worthy Competitor To Spotify — If You Already Have A Prime Membership

Published 4:03 pm, Thursday, June 12, 2014

Amazon Music lets you search through a catalogue of over 1 million songs in addition to a collection of curated playlists. You can stream songs on-demand over Wi-Fi or your data plan, and just like Spotify, you can also download tracks directly to your device for offline playback.

Here's a sense of what the minimalistic interface looks like.

The streaming service works on pretty much any device you can think of: iPhones, iPads, Amazon Kindle tablets, Android devices, Mac and PC, and there's even a browser version.

You'll need to be an Amazon Prime member to use the service, and there's no "lite" version with radio or baked-in adds; in fact, there's no radio service or advertisements at all. Prime membership costs $99 a year, but that gets you access to Amazon's Prime Instant Video library, free two-day shipping on plenty of items, and the ability to take out books from Kindle's Lending Library.

It's a nice cherry on top of an already solid bundle of services, and that's where the genius of Amazon Music comes into play. Amazon Music is best thought of as a less-impressive and less-comprehensive Spotify Premium, but Amazon is betting it might prove to be the perk that pushes people over the edge and into its Prime membership.

We gave Amazon Music a try on iPhone, iPad, and the web browser player. Here's what it's like:

First, you'll need to sign in to your Amazon Prime account.

Since Amazon Music encompasses any of your past Amazon MP3 or Cloud music purchases and puts them all in one place, you can check out your purchased or uploaded music — or just jump right into streaming.

Browsing is a pretty standard experience; you can switch among songs, albums, and playlists. The blue plus buttons will add music or entire albums to a collection called Your Library, which holds all your past Amazon purchases or uploads.

The Prime selection is hands-down the weakest part of Amazon Music. 1 million songs may seem like a lot, but when compared with streaming leader Spotify, it just doesn't hold up. Amazon also has yet to forge a deal with Universal Music Group, and the portfolio of hit-makers is noticeably absent.

It will depend on how obscure or mainstream your music tastes are: If you're into the hits, you'll notice a lot of holes; if you're into music that most people haven't heard of, Amazon's lack of robust library will also likely stump you. It's a middle ground that hurts Amazon Music, and only strengthens the idea that Amazon Music is designed to be added icing on the already-frosted cake that is the Prime ecosystem.

The best feature of Amazon Music is the ability to not only save songs to your collection, but to also download them onto your device for offline play. It's a feature commuters and people without data plans have gravitated toward Spotify Premium for in the past, but Amazon Music lets you do it, too. For Spotify Premium users who are also Prime members, it just might be the feature that prompts them to make the jump.

To download a song to your device, you'll first have to save it to your library. After that, you just swipe left and tap "download."

Another big focus of Amazon Music is in building playlists and streaming the playlists Amazon curates for you. It's simple enough to add songs to playlists, but for those who commute to work in a car or by subway where service is spotty or nonexistent, you'll need to create a playlist containing only tracks downloaded offline to the device.

Here's a glance at some of the curated playlists.

Underneath the hood, Amazon allows you to choose between low-, medium-, or high-quality bit rates for streaming, though it tops out at 256Kbps, whereas Spotify Premium offers 320Kbps. You can also import playlists already on your device (such as the Purchased playlist from any device with iTunes music). There's additional options to increase your cache size, ensure you only stream or download music while connected to Wi-Fi, auto-download any music purchases from Amazon, and (of course) a toggle for broadcasting what you're listening to via Facebook.

There's still plenty of bugs to be worked out. In particular, the Search function is pretty terrible in its current state. More often than not, plugging in an artist or specific song would result in a hit, but once the song, album, or artist was selected, a loading screen would freeze the screen until an error message appeared.

At the end of its first day, Amazon Music has proven it's capable of delivering the core on-demand streaming experience people desire. The library of streaming tracks is skeletal, sure, but Amazon has the power to change that, it's just a matter of when.

Most importantly, Amazon Music has chosen the right bundle of features from Spotify to mimic. Apple, on the other hand, failed in this regard with iTunes Radio, which takes from radio-streaming services such as Pandora. People like the ability to search for specific songs, and Amazon Music has hitched itself onto the right train.

The real test will be for those already entrenched in Spotify's ecosystem.

With its monstrous music selection, Spotify is still the best streaming app out there. But it's no longer a no-brainer, and those with a foot in both Amazon and Spotify's camp will need to weigh the ability to cut costs with the very real hit to music selection they would face for making the jump.

Amazon Music will have people legitimately thinking about it, however, and that's a slam-dunk of a first step.